62 A NATUBALIST'S WANDERINGS 



hand, forest seeds refuse to root in it. Neither the incessant 

 rains, nor the driest droughts of summer kill it. The fire may 

 sweeD the surface hare, hut it fails to touch the roots, which 

 spring again in fresher vigour through the ashes. Deep shade 

 alone seems to check its growth. The native in the hill 

 regions does not make saivahs (which are good from year to 

 year), but constantly takes in his fields by felling, w^hcre he 

 lists, in the unbroken forest. As, after reaping for only two 

 seasons this new land, (on which he scatters his seed between the 

 fallen trunks), he deserts it for a newer patch, broad tracts of 

 the island are every year becoming covered with this ineradi- 

 cable exhauster of the soil, and by-and-bye the virgin forests 

 of this country Avill have entirely ceased, if some sharper 



supervision be not exercised by the Government over the 



timber-felling mania of the native. As Colonel "Beddome 

 remarks of the like devastation in India : " the value of the 

 timber thus destroyed by one man, calculating it by the 

 number of logs it might have yielded, is at least twenty times 

 as great as the value of the crop of ragi obtained in the 

 two years that cultivation is continued. The low jungle 

 which comes up after desertion of Txiimari land is more 

 injurious to health than lofty forest open below. Besides 

 health considerations and decrease of rain and moisture, this 

 rude system of culture [results in] the destruction of valuable 

 timber .... and renderinij of land unfit for coffee," 



The present vegetation of the whole of this portion of the 

 island stands on an unbroken layer of volcanic mud, which tells 

 of a period of almost unparalleled volcanic activity. AVherever 

 the streams have opened sections, or a road cutting has 

 been made, numbers of great trees, some of them thirty yards 

 in length, are exposed in a completely silicified condition, and 

 often so perfectly as to have preserved to their cores the 

 structure of their tissues. Standing on some one of these bare 

 denuding slopes, I have tried to picture to myself the terrible 

 outburst in which this region must have been overwhelmed, at 

 a date which cannot geologically have been very remote ; for 

 lying prostrate in great numbers as they were, — many of them 

 having fallen across each other, — the forest of w^hich they 

 formed a part must have been suddenly entombed beneath an 

 avalanche of the petrifying mud so deep that the powerfully 



